Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Observing how two people act toward one another can sometimes tell you something about their relationship. Althoughthere has been some work in the social cognition literature on how people represent different types of social relationships(Haslam, 1994; Fiske & Haslam, 1996), there have been few attempts to study how people make inferences about thoserelationships. We present a probabilistic computational model of how people make these inferences that builds on previouswork (Jern & Kemp, 2014). We extend the model to account for social interactions in which two people in an interactionare each making choices that affect one another simultaneously. We tested the model in two experiments in which subjectsobserved the outcome of two players’ choices in games like the prisoner’s dilemma and made inferences about the players’relationships. The results were largely consistent with the model’s predictions with some notable exceptions.